Why Company Culture Impacts Your Turnover

More than ever before, employees have the upper hand in the employment game. They have information (just take a look at Glassdoor or Indeed company reviews) and more options (ahem, hello record-low unemployment) than ever before. Plus, companies that are willing to offer attractive benefits like generous leave, flexible working and a rewarding culture will leave the competition in the dust.

A high turnover rate is a symptom of a bigger problem. It could be your pay is off the market rate, or your health benefits aren't up to snuff. But sometimes, it's that your culture isn't delivering. Here are three ways your culture could be impacting your turnover.

Bad Culture Symptom No. 1: Employees Don't Feel Valued

The quickest way to develop a positive work culture is for your team members to genuinely feel like a valued and important part of your business. Action Step: Encourage leaders in your business to recognize employees in meaningful ways that they’ll appreciate:

Get to know what motivates employees by asking for feedback and offering a variety of perks, whether that's extra time off, bonus checks or company outings.

Peer-to-peer recognition is powerful in that it has a double impact; it rewards the recognized employee, but it also boosts engagement in the employee who does the recognizing.

Make recognition happen regularly, not just at performance reviews or on a rigid quarterly schedule. Recognition should be often and when deserved, not on a timeline.

Bad Culture Symptom No. 2: No Professional Development

"Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don't want to." - Sir Richard Branson

If your professional development program is lacking, you’re missing a major opportunity to hook employees for the long-term. There are some people who think training is a waste of time because it improves an employee and empowers them to move on, but that school of thinking is old and dangerous. Today’s workers, especially younger generations, want to learn and improve themselves. These are the workers you want, so don’t waste their drive because of a fear of losing them. Chew on these powerful statistics:

Only a third of employees are very satisfied with their organizations' commitment to professional development (SHRM).

Nearly half of HR professionals say their most effective recruiting strategy for hard-to-fill positions is to train existing employees (SHRM).

41% of Millennials say they'd leave their job for one that offered a professional development program (Gallup)

Action Step: Start training and make a plan for the future for every single employee. Not everyone needs to have a pathway to management, but every worker deserves the dignity of having a future worth pursuing.Talk to employees to learn what they want to learn, and start looking at implementing a Learning Management System.

Bad Culture Symptom No. 3: Your Onboarding Is No Good

A combination of high turnover and short employment periods is a strong indicator that your employee onboarding program needs work, and that ties into culture. First of all, companies that don’t utilize a proven onboarding program are less likely to have their other ducks in a row. And second, one of the best parts of a great onboarding program is the ability to demonstrate your company culture quickly. Your business should be proud of its values, and those should be obvious in the everyday culture. Use onboarding to not only spell out those values, but also to show concrete examples of how employees and the business live up to them.

Action Step: If you don't have a formal onboarding program, don't wait another day. Download our free onboarding checklist and get started. If you already have one, but it needs work, get a free HR assessment from our onboarding specialists.

Company culture is a critical part of holding onto valuable employees in today's job market. To help keep your turnover rates low, make sure your company culture values its employees, invests in their future and lives up to the values your company believes in. A positive company culture offers a major opportunity to differentiate your business and keep employees for the long-term.